SpiderOak Announces Unlimited Secure Cloud Storage

Posted on March 19, 2014 By Pedro Hernandez

SpiderOak wants to make it easier for businesses to store data on the cloud without fearing that their data is susceptible to snoops or that they will run out of room.

The San Francisco-based cloud storage specialist announced today that it was simplifying its pricing model. SpiderOak is offering security-conscious businesses unlimited cloud storage for $5 per user per month.

The company made a splash in the pre-Snowden days of 2012 when it introduced a "Blue" tier to its enterprise subscription offerings. Well before the NSA spying scandal rocked the IT industry -- and cloud services providers in particular -- SpiderOak settled on an encrypted storage platform to secure customer data.

Ben Zimmerman, a developer at SpiderOak, explained how the system worked in a blog post. "Even if we wanted to access your data or received a subpoena to do so, we could never turn over plaintext data. This is accomplished by encrypting all data on your machine before it is sent to us, using encryption keys generated from your password," he wrote.

Now, the company is sweetening the deal with unlimited cloud storage. SpiderOak said in a statement that the company "makes it easy for organizations to safely and securely put their sensitive data in the cloud" by combining its Zero-Knowledge approach to data privacy with plenty of room to store, share and sync files.

The new per-user pricing model is SpiderOak's way of easing cloud adoption hurdles for businesses. "After analyzing the market and seeing the convoluted ways other providers use metered pricing for certain levels of storage, we believe the simplicity and flexibility of a flat rate model is the best approach and it continues to resonate strongly," said Ethan Oberman, CEO of SpiderOak, in a statement.

To coincide with the announcement, the company unveiled a new mobile app for iOS and Android that has been "specifically designed for enterprise users." The app features business-oriented deployment capabilities and will soon enable administrators to remotely wipe data on users' devices.

The company also unveiled a redesigned SpiderOak Blue Enterprise Management Console. Version 2 of the dashboard offers new locally managed user provisioning, delegated administrator access and reporting functionality.

SpiderOak's new pricing plan applies to its Blue Enterprise hosted and private cloud storage plans. A Blue SMB plan, under a similar pricing structure, is in the works.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.